{"id":433,"date":"2021-02-11T12:03:58","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T11:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.blogs.yokogawa.de\/life-innovation\/2021\/02\/11\/interview-prisca-liberali\/"},"modified":"2022-07-22T09:44:14","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T07:44:14","slug":"interview-prisca-liberali","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yokogawa.com\/eu\/blog\/life-innovation\/interview-prisca-liberali\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t be afraid, be bold"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, February 11, is\u00a0<\/em>the international day of women and girls in science<\/em><\/a>. A pledge to dismantle gender stereotypes and to end the gender imbalance in science. Did you know that less than thirty percent of scientists globally are women?<\/em><\/p>\n

When it comes to natural sciences like physics or chemistry, only 5 percent of all globally\u00a0<\/em>enrolled students for these subjects are female. Time to change, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

We are so proud to conduct this interview with Prisca Liberali, Junior Group Leader at Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel (Switzerland).\u00a0 At the same time, Prisca is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Basel. She holds a Ph.D. degree from the department of cell biology and oncology at Mario Negro Sud (Italy). Recently, she received the Friedrich-Miescher-Award 2021 for her research on design principles of tissue organization.<\/em>
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Interview with Prisca Liberali<\/h2>\n

Prisca, it\u2019s a pleasure to have you virtually here. Could you briefly describe your function as a Junior Group Leader at the FMI institute?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prisca Liberali: I am in charge of my lab of around 12 to 14 people, both Master\u2019s students, Ph.D., and Postdocs. Together, we run the research program on different multicellular systems such as organoids and gastruloids.
\nOn the other side, I am also teaching undergrad and graduate students at University Basel. In this semester, I give lectures about \u2018multicellular systems\u2019.<\/p>\n

Why focus on organoids?<\/h2>\n

Why did you decide to focus on organoids and drug discovery?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prisca Liberali: I am a chemist who moved to cell biology, looking at the population of cells. It was becoming more and more clear that looking at the full population of cells,\u00a0 to examine the full tissue, would be very important. This is why when I started my lab in 2015, we started working on intestinal organoids<\/a>. We tried to recapitulate how they develop from mouse and human stem cells. They are giving us the chance to look at human development and diseases directly. This creates an incredible power for drug discovery and to answer fundamental questions in cell and developmental biology.<\/p>\n